Insights
Older articles, page 2
Practical articles from Palmate Solutions on APIs, hosting, automation, e-commerce technology, and software planning — written beside the tools and services on this site. Page 2 of 5.
Articles 2 of 5
51 articles, newest first. Page 2 of 5.
Web Development
CMS vs Custom Website: How to Choose
When a CMS is the right default, when a custom site earns its keep, and how to avoid a hybrid that nobody can update.
Web Development
How to Structure a Service Website That Ranks and Converts
Information architecture for a professional-services site: service pages, proof, enquiry paths, and internal links that help both search and sales.
APIs & Integrations
REST vs Webhooks vs Polling: Choosing an Integration Pattern
When to pull on a schedule, when to receive events, and when a REST call on a user action is enough — without turning every vendor into a real-time fantasy.
APIs & Integrations
OAuth vs API Keys for Business Integrations
How to choose auth for vendor APIs: keys, OAuth2 grants, rotation, and what “we logged in once in Postman” fails to become in production.
APIs & Integrations
How to Design API Error Handling Operations Can Use
Error bodies, correlation ids, and operator copy that turn a 500 into a replayable incident — instead of a spinner and a WhatsApp screenshot.
Cloud & DevOps
Database Backups You Can Actually Restore
A backup is a file until you have restored it into staging on a clock. How to design dumps, volume snapshots, and restore drills for a business app.
Cloud & DevOps
What CI/CD Actually Means for a Small Engineering Team
Continuous delivery for a five-person product: tests that gate deploys, artefacts you can roll back, and a pipeline that is not SSH-and-hope.
Cloud & DevOps
Staging Environments That Match Production
Staging that uses the same compose graph, anonymised data, and restore drills — so “it worked in staging” stops being a punchline.
Cloud & DevOps
How to Monitor a Business Application Without Alert Fatigue
Metrics, logs, and pages that mean “act” — lag, error rates, and disk — instead of a dashboard nobody opens and a channel nobody reads.
Automation
When to Use Zapier vs Custom Automation
A practical split: when a workflow tool is enough, when you need a queued job you own, and how zaps become the integration layer you cannot debug.
Automation
How to Write SOPs That Can Be Automated
Turn tribal knowledge into a procedure with named systems, ids, exceptions, and pause points — so automation is encoding, not guessing.
Automation
Human-in-the-Loop Automation: Review Queues That Work
Where a person must approve, edit, or reject machine output — without recreating the inbox you tried to kill.